It's an ill wind that blows nobody some good...
(Tim, w/thanks to Scott) Being profoundly color blind, I've known it's not always a deficit. Here's a good article on the sexes, their senses and sense utilities (ahem) documenting what I've long known; that the ill wind of colorblindness does indeed blow us some good.
The story's told that, during the Second World War, the RAF had a small group of pilots they noted were quite good at spotting camouflage. When they looked into the matter, they found the thing this group of pilots had in common was that they were all color blind and had memorized the color charts to get into the RAF.
As the article puts it, "'Dichromads do better at tasks where color acts as a distraction,' in situations where spotting camouflaged objects is important, for example."
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it goes the other way as well.
there are tetrachromatic people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Possibility_of_human_tetrachromats
This doesn't surprise me at all because of two experiences. My college roommate's husband is color blind as well and they would always make sure to do things like shopping for household things (furniture, wallpaper) together because, while she saw the colors, he recognized patterns in a different way.
I also used to know of another lab person who was colorblind. She was actually a very good hematologist, contrary to expectation. We normally think of color being very important (some white cells stain with red granules, others stain with dark blue, etc.) for differentiating different white blood cell types. But she had gotten so good at recognizing patterns, she didn't need the color as a cue and could read a badly stained slide as well as the rest of us could read a properly stained one.
Kamilla
> Given the choice between heterosexual male body odor and gay male body odor, heterosexual men and women and lesbians prefer heterosexual male body odor, but gay men choose the gay male body odor.
Homosexual men smell different than normal men? Oh boy. You learn something new every day. It doesn't say the differently "oriented" women smell different.
> "Males can reproduce daily," Wysocki said, and there is less evolutionary pressure on them to gain more information from potential mates.
"Evolutionary pressure" is certainly against the homosexuals, who can't reproduce at all.
While we're on "ill winds," do bisexuals have a different odor than homosexuals and heterosexuals? What about polygamists and monogamists? Pedophiles...?
Fascinating and fun article...thanks for posting!
I wonder if this hilarious pun was intentional: "Olfaction takes a nosedive...."
And it's also amusing that color blindness isn't metaphorically color blind: "between 6 percent and 7 percent of the caucasian male population. ...in African and Asian populations is less common by half...."
I hesitate to ask what might be the benefit of muleheaded stubbornness, though: "'Men are more likely to need hearing aids, but women are more likely to wear them,' Limb said." Is it just because they've finally found a way to get their talkative wives to shut up? ;-)
And I never thought about the sense of taste being crucial to survival. That was interesting.
Some interesting information I "learnt" in film/video production classes: "Humans are more sensitive to light and shadow-luminance differences-than to color. The human eye has approximately 125 million rods which respond to luminance differences and only 7 million cones that respond to color." ("Lighting for Film and Digital Cinematography", second edition.) The entire book has only 4 pages in the middle with color examples. The rest of the book is black and white photos from films/plays. The visual "zone" scale is numbered "0" to "10" with 0 meaning complete black or no light and 10 meaning complete white or no shadow. The good director of photography understands that contrast, light, and shadow are what the viewer will be affected by the most. An interesting thing with movies that are known for a strong color palette is that the colorist editor has to make slight changes in the intensity of the colors throughout the scenes and shots or else the eye will begin to "white balance" the shots and eventually you will no longer see the color scheme. Think of movies like The Matrix, Dick Tracy, Batman, and Underworld. These movies are known for their color schemes; however, without subtle changes throughout, you would not even notice the colors after a while. They say a real master knows the balance between color and black and white. Black and white (or luminance) being more important. Look at some old black and white films - amazing stuff!
So anyway, all you color-blind folks will be just fine!
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